Lucasfilm Games is ready to make more Star Wars games that do not need blockbuster budgets. Vice president Douglas Reilly said smaller, more focused projects like Star Wars Zero Company and Star Wars: Galactic Racer are "very much part of the strategy" going forward, while big AAA releases like Battlefront will stay at the center of the slate.
Reilly made the comments in an interview on The Game Business Show, released on Thursday (October 15th), where host Christopher Dring spoke with him alongside Fuse Games CEO Matt Webster. The two games came up because both were made by independent studios and both have landed with critics in a big way.
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Two Star Wars Hits In Two Months
Star Wars Zero Company launched on August 27 for PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. It is a single-player, turn-based tactics game set in the final stretch of the Clone Wars, developed by Bit Reactor in collaboration with Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. Bit Reactor is made up of veterans of the XCOM series, and it shows. The game currently sits at 85 on Metacritic.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer followed on October 6 on the same platforms. It is the debut game from Fuse Games, a UK studio founded in 2023 by former Criterion leaders who worked on the Battlefront games, and it was published by Secret Mode. The runs-based racer currently holds an 88 on Metacritic, which puts it among the best-reviewed Star Wars games in roughly two decades.
Dring pointed out that both studios are famous for a specific genre and essentially made Star Wars versions of what they do best. He then asked Reilly whether fans should expect more of these high quality, AA projects from veteran independent teams.
What Lucasfilm Games Said
Reilly did not hesitate. "It very much is part of the strategy. Obviously, making the big, huge AAA games like Battlefront and other kinds of things, they're always going to be a central part of the strategy. But one of the great things about Star Wars, it has all kinds of other opportunities to tell stories in different genres," he said.
He added that the goal is to find the best partner to bring each experience to life in the galaxy far, far away, and that the size of the project should match the idea. "It doesn't have to always be AAA. Sometimes it can be AA. And it's really about the experience that we're delivering and the fantasy we're fulfilling. And sometimes those fantasies aren't AAA fantasies. Sometimes they're smaller in scale, smaller in scope," Reilly explained.
According to Reilly, smaller games give Lucasfilm room to take an iconic moment from the movies that fans love and let players be part of it in a new way. He also made it clear that a smaller budget does not mean a lesser game. Talking about Galactic Racer, he said the team does not see it as AA in terms of execution and called it "the best expression of Star Wars racing you could probably imagine." The difference, he said, comes down to scope and budget, and he praised games that can deliver one thing very well and then stop, without throwing "everything in the kitchen sink" into a single release.
Bigger Doors For Smaller Studios
Reilly also explained that Lucasfilm is now a licensing business and no longer publishes its own games. Its job is to pair the right publisher with the right developer, the way Secret Mode was matched with Fuse. That approach has made the company more open about where it takes pitches from.
"Good ideas can come from a lot of different places. You don't have to necessarily be a top five publisher to make a great Star Wars game," Reilly said. He noted that Lucasfilm still has a high quality bar, so it usually works with experienced teams, but he teased that the company is exploring projects "large and small" with partners that will continue to surprise fans.
Webster backed that up from the developer side. He said Fuse began working with Lucasfilm in its fourth week as a studio and described the partnership as very different from other licensing deals he has worked on. "I've worked with other licensed partners in the past and it's an approval transaction model. This is not that by any stretch of the imagination," he said.
Fuse also has more planned for Galactic Racer. Webster said the studio does not want the game to be a one-and-done release and has ideas and plans in place that it expects to talk about in the coming weeks and months, shaped by how players respond.
Would you rather see Lucasfilm Games put more of its focus on smaller, genre-focused Star Wars games, or do you still want big AAA blockbusters like Battlefront to come first?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.